Our Lady of La Salette: the woman who was weeping

On 19 September 1846, on a mountain above a village in the French Alps, two children minding cows came home with a story no one wanted to believe. Mélanie Calvat was fourteen and could barely read. Maximin Giraud was eleven and could not keep still. They had met a woman sitting on a stone, her face in her hands, weeping.

They were not pious children. They had met three days earlier, they did not much like each other, and neither knew the catechism well enough to be confirmed. Hold on to that. Heaven did not look for two souls already prepared. It looked for two children who would repeat, word for word, something they did not understand — and who would go on repeating it, unchanged, under interrogation, for the rest of their lives.

A woman weeping on a mountain

She was seated, bent over, elbows on her knees, her face in her hands. When they came near she stood, and she spoke first — and her first words were not a reproach.

Notice the order. Before anything else she tells two frightened children not to be afraid, and she calls what is coming news — not a threat, not a sentence. Everything else she said that afternoon must be read from inside that sentence, or it will be read wrongly.

She wept the whole time she spoke. Mélanie, groping for words, said it best: she looked like a mother whose children had beaten her, and who had run off into the mountain to cry.

What she wore

The children described her in detail, and the detail is the message. She was dressed like the women of their own valley — long dress, apron, kerchief crossed and tied behind, a peasant’s cap. Roses crowned her head, edged her kerchief and lay on her shoes. On her shoulders a heavy chain. And on her breast, hung from a finer chain, a blazing crucifix, with a hammer on one side and a pair of pincers on the other. All the light that covered the three of them came from that cross.

Ask any child what those two tools are for and they will tell you: one drives the nails in, the other draws them out. She was wearing, over her heart, the two things a person can do with the Passion of her Son. You can drive the nails deeper. Or you can take them out. There is no third tool on that cross.

“How long I have suffered for you”

Then she spoke about herself, and this is the part that is almost never quoted, though it is the hinge of the whole message.

She is not describing a feeling. She is describing an office: I am charged with praying to him without ceasing. That is intercession, and it is work, and it has been going on the whole time you were not thinking about it. The reproach that follows is not that we sinned spectacularly. It is smaller and worse: you take no notice.

The arm of her Son

It is almost always quoted alone, and quoting it alone ruins it. Read it again with the verb in the middle: I am forced. She is not the one striking. She is the one holding the arm up, and she is telling two illiterate children that her arms are giving out. A mother does not say that to frighten you. She says it so that someone will come and help her hold.

The two things that weigh it down

She then named them. Not vague wickedness — two habits, both of them the kind a decent person can slide into without ever noticing.

A stolen Sunday and a name used as a curse. She does not mention murder. She mentions the two sins a working man commits on an ordinary Tuesday, and she says it is these that are breaking her arms.

The hardest thing she said

And then the passage that is quietly left out of most retellings, because it stings the people most likely to be reading about an apparition.

Read that again. They go to Mass only to make fun of religion. The worst thing she names is not absence from church — it is presence in church without faith. A man who stays home is at least honest. The one she weeps over is the one in the pew whose heart is somewhere else, and who would be embarrassed to be caught believing any of it.

And Lent: like dogs. She is not being decorative. A dog eats what is in front of it because a dog cannot do otherwise. A baptised man can. When he stops being able to, something in him has died that he did not notice dying.

The question she asked them

In the middle of all that, she stopped and asked the two children a domestic question, the kind a grandmother asks.

They told her the truth and she did not scold them. She gave them a floor, not a ceiling: two prayers, night and morning, and when you can do better, say more. That is the entire ascetical programme of La Salette. It fits in one line. Nobody is too poor, too busy or too ignorant for it — which is exactly why having not done it leaves a man with nothing to say.

And the priests?

This has to be said carefully, because a great deal is attributed to La Salette that La Salette did not say.

In the message the Church examined and approved, the Blessed Virgin says nothing whatever about priests. Not one word. Every reproach is aimed at the people: the Sunday sold for a day’s work, the Name used as a curse, the Mass attended in mockery, Lent broken, prayer abandoned. If you came here looking for a stick to beat the clergy with, she does not hand you one. She hands you a mirror.

The famous passage about priests belongs to a different text — the so-called Secret, which Mélanie published herself decades later, in 1879, long after the apparition was approved. It is not part of what Bishop de Bruillard declared in 1851, and Rome moved against its circulation. Whatever one makes of it, it is honest to say plainly: that is not the message of La Salette.

But there is a real link between this mountain and the priesthood, and it is better than the one people reach for. The Church’s answer to La Salette was priests. On 1 May 1852, the same bishop who approved the apparition announced two things in one document: that a shrine would be built on the mountain, and that a body of missionaries would be founded to carry the message — the Missionaries of Our Lady of La Salette, whose work is preaching, reconciliation and calling people back. And in 1855 his successor, Bishop Ginoulhiac, drew the line under the whole affair in a single sentence:

“The mission of the shepherds is finished; that of the Church begins.”— Bishop Ginoulhiac, 19 September 1855

That is the real rebuke to negligence, and it falls first on whoever has the care of souls. Two children who could not read carried this for five years against interrogation and ridicule. Then it was handed to men who were ordained to carry it. If it is dropped now, it is not being dropped by fourteen-year-olds.

“You will make this known”

She climbed a little way up the slope, turned, and gave them the only command she left behind. Then she rose into the light and was gone.

She said it twice, to be sure they had it. They were interrogated, doubted, separated, questioned for years by men far cleverer than they were, and they never changed a word. On 19 September 1851, five years to the day, the Bishop of Grenoble judged that the apparition bears in itself all the marks of truth, and that the faithful are justified in believing it beyond doubt.

The spring on that mountain had been dry. It has not stopped running since.

Notre-Dame de La Salette, Réconciliatrice des pécheurs, priez sans cesse pour nous qui avons recours à vous. Our Lady of La Salette, Reconciler of sinners, pray without ceasing for us who have recourse to you.